The Cambridge Companion To Foucault Foucault, The History Of Ethics And Ancient Thought

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NOTES

Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 45-56, offer an extensive and useful discussion of what it means for a statement to be a "serious act" in Foucault's earlier work. 2 Undoubtedly the best discussion in English of Foucault's work in this period is Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault's Archaeologyof ScientificReason. 3 Gutting (ibid.) and Dreyfus and Rabinow (Michel Foucault) each provide a useful and interesting discussion of the nature and s i d c a n c e of this emphasis on discourse, although their accounts are not mutually consistent. 4 Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 5 Among the more prominent and sophisticated expressions of this concern are Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," in David Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader, 69-102; Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory; and Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 6 Taylor, ":Foucault on Freedom and Truth," 94. 7 Richard Rorty, "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodemity," in Richard Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1985)~ 172. 8 Thomas Wartenburg, The Forms of Power: From Domination to h a n s formation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990)~150. 9 Ibid., 149-61. 10 Ibid., 170. 11 Ibid., 173. 12 Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 23 1-32. I 3 Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader, 47. 14 TWOexcellent examples of such feminist reflection are Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985); and Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," in Donna Haraway, ed., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, rggo), 183-201. 15 Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca: Come11 University Press, 1987)~esp. chap. 7, and "Foucault and the Natural Sciences," in J. Caputo and M. Yount, eds., Institutions, Normalization, and Power (StateCollege: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). I

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Ethcs as ascetics: Foucault, the history of ethcs, and ancient thought

In presenting the topic of Michel Foucault's significanceas a writer of the history of ethics, I have two main goals. First, I hope to be able to elucidate Foucault's own aims in shifting his attention, in his last writings, to what he himself called "ethics." These aims, in my opinion, have been widely misinterpreted and even more widely ignored, and the result has been a failure to come to terms with the conceptual and philosophical distinctiveness of Foucault's last works. Volumes z and^ of The History -- -- of Sexuality are about sex in roughly the way that -- -Discipline and Punish is about the-pnson. As the modem prison serves as a reference point for Foucault to work out his analytics of power, so ancient sex functions as the material around which Foucault elaborates his conception of ethics. Although the history of sex is, obviously, sexier than the history of ethics, it is this latter history that oriented Foucault's last writings. Foucault once remarked to me, as he had to others, that "sex is so boring." He used this remark in different ways on different occasions, but one thing he meant by it was that what made sex so interesting to him had little to do with sex itself. His focus on the history of ancient sex, its interest for him, was part of his interest in the history of ancient ethics. Whatever one's disagreements with Foucault's interpretation of specific ancient texts, his conceptualization of ethics, the framework in which he placed these interpretations, is as potentially transformative for writing the history of ethics as, to take the strongest comparison I can think of, John Rawls's A Theory of lustice is, in its cultural context, for articulating the aims of political philosophy. But this transformative potential has been obscured for philosophy by a way of thinking about and writing the history of ethics that passes over the very domain that Foucault demarcated as ethics, as if Reprinted from Foucault and the Writing of History, edited by Jan Goldstein and published by Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA, 1994. It is reprinted with the permission of Blackwell.

Ethics as ascetics whatever Foucault wrote about in these works, it could not have been ethics. And this potential has been further darkened in the discussions of some classicists who, to give only a partial caricature, have been so taken with tired and tiresome debates about whether Foucault knew enough Greek and Latin to legitimize his readings of the texts of classical and late antiquity that they have lost sight of his most basic aims. By giving an interpretation of Foucault's work that attempts to clarify these aims, and to show how they affected his readings of particular texts, I hope to reorient discussions of his last works toward what I think is genuinely at stake in them - how to conceptualize ethics and how to write its history. My second goal, not unrelated to my first, is to place Foucault's work in the context of writings by historians of ancient thought: Paul Veyne, Georges Dum6zi1, and especially Pierre Hadot, with whom Foucault was engaged in intense, if sometimes submerged, intellectual exchange. These writers, as well as others such as JeanPierre Vernant, in turn discussed Foucault's work in terms that help us to see how it can be elaborated and criticized in philosophically fruitful ways. The reception of Foucault's last writings by French ancient historians and philosophers is markedly disjoint from its Anglo-American reception, not, as some people seem to believe, because of the dynamics of French fads, but rather because the manner in which Foucault conceptualized issues showed clear resonances with work that had been and continues to be undertaken by the most significant historians of ancient thought in France. Setting the proper intellectual context will help us to understand better the contours and emplacement of Foucault's own writing on ancient thought, and thus help us to see how his conceptualization of ethics relates to, derives from, and modifies a set of considerations that were not his alone. One of my ultimate interests in Foucault's interpretation of ethics stems from the way in which I think it can be used to transform our understanding of texts and historical periods that he himself did not discuss. In other parts of this project to reassess Foucault's history of ethics, I will show how his conceptualization of ethics provides a compelling interpretative framework for understanding the genre of early Christian virginity treatises. Less predictably, I also argue that Old Testament texts on abominations can be rethought, and certain long-standing problems resolved, by sifting these texts through the

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specific conception of ethics rooted in Foucault's work. But this interest in using Foucault requires a positioning of his thought centered around the history of ethics, and it is to this philosophical positioning, and to its concepts, its sources, and consequences, that I shall restrict myself here. The first volume of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality was published in 1976. The back cover of that volume announced the titles of the five forthcoming volumes that would complete Foucault's project. Volume 2 was to be called The Flesh and the Body and would concern the prehistory of our modem experience of sexuality, concentrating on the problematization of sex in early Christianity. Volumes 3 through 5 were to focus on some of the major figures (of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) around which problems, themes, and questions of sex had come to circle. Volume 3, The Children's Crusade, would discuss the sexuality of children, especially the problem of childhood masturbation; volume 4, Woman, Mother, Hysteric, would discuss the specific ways in which sexuality had been invested in the female body; volume 5, Perverts, was planned to investigate exactly what the title named, the person of the pervert, an ever-present target of nineteenth-century thought. Finally, volume 6, Population and Races, was to examine the way in which treatises, both theoretical and practical, on the topics of population and race were linked to the history of what Foucault had called "biopolitics. "I In 1984, when volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality were finally published, some years after they had been expected, many of Foucault's readers must have been bewildered by their content, to say the least. This bewilderment was occasioned, most immediately, by the profound chronological reorientation of these two volumes. Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure, studied problems of sex in classical Greek thought, while volume 3, The Care of the Self, analyzed theses problems as they appeared in Greek and Latin texts of the first and second centuries A.D. Moreover, in the introduction to volume 2, which served as an introduction to his new project, Foucault reconceptualized the entire aim of his history of sexuality and introduced a set of concepts that had been absent from volume I. The most significant philosophical consequence of this reorientation was Foucault's conceptualization of ethics, his theoretical elabora-

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tion of ethics as a framework for interpreting these Greek and Roman problematizations of sex. I shall leave aside here many of the general features of Foucault's conceptualization of ethics, since I have discussed them at length elsewhere.. But given the way this essay will proceed, I should remind you that Foucault thought of ethics as that component of morality that concerns the self's relationship to itself. Foucault argued that our histories of morality should not be ex;clusively focused on the history of codes of moral behavior, and that we must also pay careful attention to the history of the forms of moral subjectivation, to how we constitute ourselves s moral subjects of our own actions. Foucault thought of ethics roper, of the self's relationship to itself, as having four main asects: *e ethical substance, that part of oneself that 1s taken to be e relevant domain for ethical judgment; the mode of subjection, e way in which the individual establishes his or her relation to ral obligations and rules; the self-forming activity or ethical work t one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself into an thical subject; and, finally, the telos, the mode of being at which one aims in behaving ethically.3 Another way of understanding Foucault's new concern with the self's relationship to itself is to think of it, as Foucault himself explicitly did in 1980-1981, as at the intersection of two themes that he had previously treated, namely, a history of subjectivity and an analysis of the forms of governmentality. Foucault claimed that he had undertaken to study the history of subjectivity by studying the divisions carried out in society in the name of madness, illness, and delinquency, and by studying the effects of these divisions on the constitution of the subject. In addition, his history of subjectivity attempted to locate the "modes of objectivation" of the subject in scientific knowledge, for example, knowledge concerning language (linguistics), work (economics),and life (biology).As for the analysis of forms of "governrnentality," a crucial concept for Foucault's work beginning around 1977, this analysis responded' to a "double objective." On the one hand, Foucault wanted to criticize current conceptions of power that, in one way or another, perceived power as a unitary system, a critique undertaken most thoroughly in Discipline and Punish and volume I of The History of Sexuality. On the other hand, Foucault wanted to analyze power as a domain of strategic relations between individuals and groups, relations whose

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strategies were to govern the conduct of these individuals.4 Thus ~oucault'snew concern with the self would be a way of doing the history of subjectivity: no longer, however, by way of the divisions between the mad and those who are not mad, the ill and those who are not ill, delinquents and those who are not delinquents; no longer by way of the constitution of the field of scientific objectivity giving rise to the living, speaking, working subject. But rather by the putting into place and the transformations, in our culture, of the "relations to oneself," with their technical armature and their effects of knowledge. And one could thus take up, under another aspect, the question of "governmentality": the government of the self by the self in its articulation with relations to others (asone finds it in pedagogy, advice for conduct, spiritual direction, the prescription of models of life, etc.).~

As I would interpret Foucault, ethics, or the self's relation to itself, is therefore part of both the history of subjectivity and the history of governmentality. Our "technologies of the self," the ways in which we relate ourselves to ourselves, contribute to the forms in which our subjectivity is constituted and experienced, as well as to the forms in which we govern our thought and conduct.6 We relate to ourselves as specific kinds of subjects who govern themselves in particular ways. In response to the questions "What kinds of sub- jects should we be?" and "How should we govern ourselves?", Foucault offered his history of ethics. In addition to the concepts I have already mentioned, Foucault's last works introduced other related notions, most prominent that of the esthetics of existence and styles of existence. These notions are, in my opinion, far more complex and multilayered than most commentators have acknowledged. One central aspect of these notions has been lucidly described by Paul Veyne:

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The idea of styles of existence played a major role in Foucault's conversations and doubtless in his inner life during the final months of a life that only he knew to be in danger. Style does not mean distinction here; the word is to be taken in the sense of the Greeks, for whom an artist was first of all an artisan and a work of art was first of all a work. Greek ethics is quite dead and Foucault judged it as undesirable as it would be impossible to resuscitate this ethics; but he considered one of its elements, & n-e idea of a work of the self on the self, to be capable of reacquiring a contemporary meaning, in the manner of one of those pagan temple columns that are occasionally reutilized in more recent structures. We can guess at what

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might emerge from this diagnosis: the self, taking itself as a w&to be accomplished, could sustain an ethics that is no longer supported by either tradition or reason; as an artist of itself, the self would enjoy thatautonomy that modernity can no lonser do without. "Everything has disappeared," said Medea, "but I have one thing left: myself."7 This aspect of Foucault's idea of the esthetics of existence reaches its apogee in The Care of the Self, especially in the chapter entitled "The Cultivation of the Self." In this chapter, Foucault argues that in the texts of the first two centuries A.D. with which he is concerned, there is an "insistence on the attention that must be brought to bear on oneself," and that the added emphasis on sexual austerity in these texts should not be interpreted in terms of a tightening of the moral code and its prohibitions, but rather in terms of "an intensification of the relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as the subject of one's acts."s More specifically, he argues that the practices of the self in late antiquity are characterized by the general principle of conversion to self - epistrophk eis heauton.9 his conversion to self requires that one change one's activities and shift one's attention so as to constantly take care of oneself. One result of, this conversion, claims Foucault, is the "experience of a pleasure that one takes in oneself. The individual who has finally succeeded in gaining access to himself is, for himself, an object of pleasure."~o And Foucault quotes Seneca: "Disce gaudere, learn how to feel joy," says Seneca to Lucilius: "I do not wish you ever to be deprived of gladness. I would have it born in your house; and it is born there, if only it is inside of you. . . for it will never fail you when once you have found its source. . . look toward the true good, and rejoice only in that which comes from your own store [de tuo].But what do I mean by 'your own store'? I mean your very self and the best part of you.""

These texts certainly appear to advocate an esthetics of existence, a cultivation of the self, that culminates, to quote Veyne's words again, in "that autonomy that modernity cannot do without," and that is symbolized by the pleasure that one takes in oneself, a pleasure of which one cannot be deprived. But, as Pierre Hadot has convincingly argued, Seneca opposes pleasure and joy - voluptas and gaudium - and it is misleading for Foucault to speak of the joy described by Seneca as "a form of pleasure."^. More important, as Hadot indicates, Seneca finds his joy not in his self per se, but in that

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"best part of the self" that Seneca identifies with perfect reason and, ultimately, with divine reason: The 'best part' of oneself, then, is ultimately a transcendent self. Seneca does not find his joy in "Seneca," but by transcending Seneca; by discovering that he has in him a reason that is part of universal Reason, that is within all human beings and within the cosmos itself.13 Hadot has argued that an essential element of the psychic content of the spiritual exercises of ancient philosophy is "the feeling of belonging to a Whole," what he often describes as a cosmic consciousness, a consciousness of being part of the cosmic whole.14This consciousness is summarized in Seneca's four words: Toti se inserens mundo ("Plunging oneself into the totality of the world"j.15 Adjacent to the cultivation of the self, that movement of interiorization in which "one seeks to be master of oneself, to possess oneself, to find one's happiness in freedom and inner independence," emphasized by Foucault, there is "another movement, in which one raises oneself to a higher psychic level . . . which consists in becoming aware of oneself as part of Nature, as a portion of universal Reason."16 Indeed, I would claim, following Hadot, that one of the most distinctive features of that care of the self studied by Foucault in volume 3 of The History of Sexuality is its indissociable link with this cosmic consciousness; one philosophical aim of this care of the self is to transform oneself so that one places oneself in the perspective of the cosmic Whole. The care of the self receives its distinctive philosophical tint in late antiquity through those practices that raise the self to a universal level, that place the self within a cosmic dimension that at the same time transforms the self, even to the point, as Hadot writes, of surpassing the self: In Platonism, but in Epicureanism and Stoicism as well, freedom from anxi-

ety is thus achieved by a movement in which one passes from individual and impassioned subjectivity to the objectivity of the universal perspective. It is a question, not of a construction of a self as a work of art, but, on the contrary, of a surpassing of the self, or, at the least, of an exercise by which the self situates itself in the totality and experiences itself as part of this totality.I7 As Foucault himself made clear in his 198 1-1982 course at the Collkge de France, the care of the self has a very long history.18 In try-

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ing to recapture the different forms in which the care of the self has appeared, it is essential to understand not only the ways in which the self became an object of concern but also the ways in which one went beyond oneself, relating the self to something grander than ritual exercises of ancient philosophy, that philosophicentral to Foucault's last works, could, at one and the result in an intense preoccupation with the self and in a sort of dilation of the self that realized the true magnitude of the soul.19 Hadot is concerned that by focusing too exclusively on the cultivation of the self and by linking his ethical model too closely to an aesthetics of existence, Foucault was suggesting "a culture of the self that is too purely aesthetic."ao In other words, writes Hadot, "I fear a new form of dandyism, a version for the end of the twentieth century."l~Without taking up Foucault's discussion, in his essay +"what Is Enlightenment?," of dandyism in Baudelaire,"" I do think that there is a use of the concept of styles of existence to be found in Foucault's last works that can and ought to be preserved, one, moreover, that aligns Foucault's writings more closely with Hadot's own interpretation of ancient thought. Although I believe that Foucault's interpretation of the culture of the self in late antiquity is sometimes too narrow and therefore misleading, I think that this is a defect of interpretation, not of conceptualization.^^ Foucault's conceptualization of ethics as the self's relationship to itself provides us with a framework of enormous depth and subtlety, and it is this framework - of ethical substance, mode of subjection, selfforming activity, and telos - that allows us to grasp aspects of ancient thought that would otherwise remain occluded. I have argued elsewhere that Foucault's conception of ethics is, in fact, indebted to Hadot's work in Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, to Hadot's history of ancient philosophy as a history of spiritual exercises.24 Nevertheless, by giving detailed conceptual content to the idea of the self's relationship to itself, by analyzing this relationship in terms of four distinct components, Foucault makes it possible for us to see precisely how to write a history of ethics that will not collapse into a history of moral codes. Furthermore, his conceptualization allows us to examine the connections, the kinds of dependence and independence, among these four aspects of ethics, thus showing us the various ways in which continuities, modifications, and ruptures can occur in one or more of these four dimensions of

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Ethics as ascetics our relation to ourselves. In some historical periods, for example, the ethical substance may remain constant, while the mode of subjection gradually alters; or the telos may stay continuous, while the self-forming activity is modified. In other periods, the ethical substance, mode of subjection, self-formingactivity, and telos may be so inextricably intertwined that they undergo change together, thereby resulting in an entirely new form of the self's relationship to itself. Pierre Hadot has brilliantly shown that one of the fundamental aspects of philosophy in the Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman eras is that philosophy "is a way of life, which does not mean only that it is a certain moral conduct. . . but that it is a way of existing in the world, which should be practiced at each instant and which should transform all of life."as A sense of philosophy as a way of life is also expressed by Foucault when he explains his own motivation in writing the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality. After claiming that for him philosophical activity consists in "the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently,"26 Foucault writes The "essay" - which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication- is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosop3y is still what it was in times past, i.e., an ascesis, askdsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.27 For Foucault himself philosophy was a spiritual exercise, an of oneself in which one submitted oneself to tests, underwent changes, in order to learn to idea of philosophy as a way of life and, I shall argue, of ethics as proposing styles of life is one of the most forceful and provocative directions of Foucault's later thought. In approaching these ideas, I want first to distinguish between the notions of a way of life and a style of life.18 in the ancient world philosophy itself was a way of life, a way of life that was distinct from everyday life, and that was perceived as strange and even dangerous. In conveying this fact about philosophy, I can do no better here than to quote Hadot's marvelous description:

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to be a philosopher implies a rupture with what the skeptics called bios, that is, daily life . . .

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This very rupture between the philosopher and the conduct of everyday life is strongly felt by nonphilosophers . . . philosophers are strange, a race apart. Strange indeed are those Epicureans, who lead a frugal life, practicing a total equality between the men and the women inside their philosophical circle - and even between married women and courtesans; strange, too, those Roman Stoics who disinterestedly administer the provinces of the Empire entrusted to them and are the only ones to take seriously the laws promulgated against excess; strange as well this Roman Platonist, the Senator Rogatianus, a disciple of Plotinus, who on the very day he is to assume his functions as praetor gives up his possessions, frees his slaves, and eats only every other day. Strange indeed all those philosophers whose behavior, without being inspired by religion, nonetheless completely breaks with the customs and habits of most mortals. By the time of the Platonic dialogues Socrates was called atopos, that is, "unclassifiable". What makes him atopos is precisely the fact that he is a "philo-sopher" in the etymological sense of the word; that is, he is in love with wisdom. For wisdom, says Diotima in Plato's Symposium, is not a human state, it is a state of perfection of being and knowledge that can only be divine. It is the love of this wisdom, which is foreign to the world, that makes the philosopher a stranger in it.=9 Stoics, Epicureans, Platonists, Cynics, and even Skeptics each embodied the philosophical way of life, a way of life whose peculiarity, whatever its particular guises, was everywhere recognized. And early Christianity, itself conceived of as a way of life, namely living in conformity with the divine Logos, was also presented as a philosophy.30 Socrates attempted to convert his interlocutors from the unexamined way of life to the philosophical way of life. It was this experience of philosophy as a way of life, and not simply as a theoretical doctrine, that brought Socrates into deadly conflict with the authorities. Given this basic characteristic of philosophy itself as a way of life, there were, of course, different philosophies, what I shall call different styles of life, different styles of living philosophically. Each philosophical school - Stoic, Epicurean, Platonist, and so on represented a style of life that had a corresponding fundamental inner attitude.31 As Hadot says, "In this period, to philosophize is to choose a school, convert to its way of life, and accept its dogmas.",~I propose that we take each particular conceptual combination of ethical substance, mode of subjection, self-forming activity,

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and telos as representing a style of life. One's style of life, as specified by a determinate content and mesh of each of these four components, gives expression to the self's relationship to itself. To indicate what part of oneself one judges, how one relates oneself to moral obligations, what one does to transform oneself into an ethical subject, and what mode of being one aims to realize is to indicate how one lives, is to characterize one's style of life. Although Foucault does not explicitly use the notion of style of life in exactly this way, this usage is, I believe, consistent with his interpretation of ancient philosophy. As we read the last volumes of The History of Sexuality, it is evident that the idea of the care of the self is part of a broader conceptual matrix, and that a history of the care of the self must be written in terms of a history of ethics.33 In every historical period the care of the self is expressed in particular relationships of the self to itself, particular styles of life. As the self's relationship to itself undergoes modification, as the way in which one cares for oneself changes, one's style of life will change. And when Foucault says that the problem of an ethics is the problem of "a form [I would say "style" here] to be given to one's conduct and one's life," he does in fact link the notions of ethics and style of life in a conceptually intimate way.34 Some of Foucault's most suggestive, and philosophically revealing, invocations of the notions of askksis and style of lge can be found in his discussions of his own attitude to homosexuality. Foucault claims that one goal of homosexuality today is "to advance into a homosexual askksis that would make us work on ourselves and invent, I do not say discover, a manner of being that is still improbable."3s Let me underline, in this quotation, the connection between askesis and manner of being, a connection that is, I would claim, also to be uncovered in Foucault's discussion of ancient male/ male sexual practices. He insists that the notion of a homosexual mode or style of life, with its new forms of relationship, is what is most significant about contemporary gay practices: Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life?This notion of mode of life seems important to me.. . It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay", I think, is not to identify with the Y the homosexual, but to try to psychological traits and the visible marks o define and develop a way of life.36

Ethics as ascetics Just as Foucault argued that ancient thought was not primarily concerned with the morphology of the sexual act,37 so he too was interested not in the nature of the sexual act itself, its morphology or shape, but in the style of life, and the corresponding art of life, of which these sexual acts are part.38 Even in his most explicit discussion of gay male sexual practices - "les pratiques physiques de type fist-fucking" - Foucault insists on relating these practices to a style of life that expresses a new sense of masculinity, a sense that is devirilised, even desexualised ("deviriliskes, voire desexueesU).39So it is these "new forms of relationship, new forms of love, new forms of creation" that most captured Foucault's attention and interest.40 Foucault believed that "what most bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay lifestyle, not sex acts themselves."41 As strange as it may sound at first, Foucault pointed to homosexuality as one resource for answering the question of how to practice spiritual exercises in the twentieth century. Ultimately, for Foucault, one link between the ancient practices of self-mastery and contemporary homosexuality is that both require an ethics or ascetics of the self tied to a particular, and particularly threatening, way of life. I know it would have given Foucault genuine pleasure to think that the threat to everyday life posed by ancient philosophy had a contemporary analogue in the fears and disturbances that derive from the self-formation and style of life of being gay.4" Although Foucault's famous declaration that he is interested in writ-

\b ing the history of the presents must certainly be acknowledged as at

play in his interpretation of ancient texts, and in the linkages that can be found in his emphases on ancient philosophical askesis and contemporary homosexual askksis, such a concern with the history of the present, which I share with Foucault, need not, and should not, lead us to transform the ancient intensification of the relation to the self into the modern estheticization of the self. The ancient experience of the self ought to retain its distinctiveness, not simply for reasons of historical accuracy but especially if it is to provide a philosophical standpoint from which we can begin to learn how to think differently. In "The Individual within the City-State", JeanPierre Vemant has reminded us how conceptually specific is the ancient notion of psuche, and how distinct it is from the modern intimacy of the self. Vernant makes analytically useful distinctions

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between the individual, the subject, and the ego. The history of the individual, in the strict sense, concerns "his place and role in his group or groups; the value accorded him; the margin of movement left to him; his relative autonomy with respect to his institutional framework."44 Vernant marks out the subject as appearing "when the individual uses the first person to express himself and, speaking in his own name, enunciates certain features that make him a unique being.I145 Finally, the ego is the ensemble of psychological practices and attitudes that give an interior dimension and a sense of wholeness to the subject. These practices and attitudes constitute him within himself as a unique being, real and original, whose authentic nature resides entirely in the secrecy of his interior life. It resides at the very heart of an intimacy to which no one except him can have access because it is defined as self-consciousness.46

Vernant compares these three levels to three literary genres: the individual corresponds to biography, a genre based on the life of a single character, in contrast to epic or historical narrative; the subject corresponds to autobiography or memoirs, where the individual tells his own life story; and the ego corresponds to confessions or a diary "in which the inner life, the unique subject of a private life - in all its psychological complexity and richness, and its relative opacity or incommunicability - provides the material for what is writ,-, ten."47 Following Arnaldo Momigliano and others, Vemant stresses that, although the Greeks produced sope forms of biography and autobiography, both the classical and Hellenistic periods lacked confessions and diaries; moreover, "the characterization of the individual in Greek autobiography allows no 'intimacy of the self.' "48 After charting the evolution from the Homeric to PIatonic conceptions of psuchd, a transformation that takes us from the soul as "a ghostly double of the body" to the body "as a ghostly reflection of the ~ 0 ~ 1 Vernant ~ ~ 4 9 insists on the importance of the fact that the Platonic psuchd is "a daim6n in us, a divine being, a supernatural force whose place and function in the universe goes beyond our single person."so This psuche, as impersonal or superpersonal force, is "the soul in me and not m y soul."s~Thus Vernant claims that the Greek experiencerof the self could not have given rise to a c o g i t ~ ergo sum, since my psuchd is not my psychological ego. Citing Bernard Groethuysen's formula, he maintains that the ancient con-

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sciousness of self consists in the apprehension of the self in a he, and not yet in an I. There is no Cartesian, or even Augustinian, selfconsciousness in the ancient preoccupation with the self.52 Can we reconcile Foucault's emphasis on the ancient care of the self with Vernant's historically nuanced argument that this psucht is a superpersonal force?How is the Greek and Roman "intensity of the relations to self" to be placed alongside the fact that this self is but a "simulacrum of the divineU?53The philosophical ideal that allows us to put together the care of the self and the psucht as daimdn is the figure of the sage or wise man. The figure of the sage is notably absent from Foucault's writings on ancient philosophy, and it is precisely this absence that sometimes permits him to pass too smoothly from ancient to modern experiences of the self. By anchoring the ideal of the sage at the basis of ancient ethics, we can better see the abyss that separates psucht from any possible estheticization of the self. The figure of the wise man, although described in different terms in different philosophical schools, was, according to Hadot, the "transcendent model that inspired all of philosophy" and that, moreover, was the basis for constructing the two other regulative models of ancient thought, the figure of the ideal king and the idea of God.54 Of the many aspects of this figure that were crucial to ancient thought, I want to focus on what Hadot, in his brilliant essay "La figure du sage dans 11Antiquit6@co-latine," describes as a fundamental theme. . . wisdom is the state in which man is at the same time essentially man and beyond man, as if the essence of man consisted in being beyond himself.55 Or, as Paul Veyne puts a similar, if more specific, claim, in his introduction to the French translation of Seneca's De 7kanquillitate animi, Stoic eudamonianism is an "ethics of the ideal" that aims to imitate the figure of the sage, "a dream situated beyond human capacities."56 Michelet differently stressed this aspect of the ideal in his formulation, "Greek religion culminated with its true God: the sage."57 Despite their contrasting concrete ideals of wisdom, all of the ancient philosophical schools conceived of philosophy and the philosopher as oriented toward this "transcendent and almost inaccessible ideal."ss Even if, as Cicero claimed, the true sage is born perhaps

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once every five hundred years, nevertheless, the philosopher can attain at least a certain relative perfection. He can hope to become, if not the ideal and divine sage, "a sage among men, conscious of the distance that separates him from the gods," a relative sage.59 But t& achievement can only be attained through the arduous path of spiritual exercises that require nothing less than a transformation of one's way of life. It is this self-transforming, life-transforming askksis that makes Socrates, and every other true philosopher, atopos. In his interpretation of Seneca, Hadot draws out a series of equivalences that takes one from the true good to the best part of the self to perfect or divine reason. Thus on this reading, as I have already indicated, Seneca's true good, which is the best part of his self, is also a transcendent self; it is the sage or daimon in Seneca.6" So in Letter 23 when Seneca urges the turning of one's attention toward the true good, he is urging a conversion to self that is at the same time a conversion to the deus in each one of o be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, is to exert a constant car of the self that, proceeding by way of spiritual exercises, culminates in the surpassing of the self, brings one to an identificationwith universal Reason, the god, the sage that both is and is beyond one's self.lThe)ay obtained when one achieves this identification requires struggle and combat with oneself, since we are "too readily satisfied with ourselves," substituting pleasurable delights for real joy.62 Real joy, writes Seneca, "is a stem matter" (verumgaudium severa est),and it demands that we go "deep below the surface" in order to take up the perspective of ,the god that is within us.63 We can acquire this real joy from within ourselves, provided that we surpass ourselves, transforming ourselves. The ancient spiritual progress that aims at wisdom, the life of the sage, confronts the apparent paradox, as formulated again by Hadot, that "man appears, in that which is most his own, as something that is more than man, or, to speak more precisely, the true self of each individual transcends each individual."64 Foucault is absolutely correct to emphasize the ancient care of the self, for conversion to self is a precondition of the spiritual transformation that constitutes philosophy. Such a conversion is, however, not to be confused with the kind of psychologization or estheticization that shrinks the world to the size of oneself. Rather, this conversion, dilating the self beyond itself, brings about that cosmic con-

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sciousness in which one sees the human world "from above."6s The care of the self does not take the form of a pose or posture, of the fashioning of oneself into a dramatic character. To invoke Plotinus' formulation, it is, instead, the sculpting of oneself as a statue, the scraping away of what is superfluous and extraneous to oneself. The art of living required by the realization of the self is not compared, by Plotinus, to painting, which was considered an art of addition, but rather to sculpture, an art of taking away. Since the statue already exists in the block of marble, it is sufficient to take away what is superfluous in order to make the statue appear. So when Plotinus tells us that if we do not yet see our own beauty we should sculpt our own beautiful statue of ourselves, far from urging any estheticization of the self, he is enjoining a purification, an exercise that liberates us from our passions and that returns us to our self, ultimately identified by Plotinus with the One.66 The beauty of this sculpting is not independent from the reality of the Goodj67 it is not an estheticization of morality, but a spiritual transfiguration in which we scrape away at ourselves, identifying with the Good beyond ourselves so that we can see our own beauty, that is, so that the "divine glory of virtue" will shine upon SO,as Plotinus maintains, "it is right to say that the soul's becoming something good and beautiful is its being made like to God . . ."69 Although underlining the cosmic consciousness of the ancient sage, Hadot does acknowledge that the figure of the sage in ancient thought corresponds to a more acute consciousness of the self, of the personality, of interiority.70But the internal freedom recognized by all the philosophical schools, "this inexpungible core of the personality," is located in the faculty of judgment, not in some psychologically thick form of introspection.71 When Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius distinguish between the things themselves and the judgments we form of those things, they are insisting on the fundamental distinction between that which depends on us (our judgments) and that which does not depend on us (the things themselves) in order to make us conscious of the power we have to be independent, to choose the judgments and representations we will have of things and not to be concerned with the things themselves.72 Intemal freedom of judgment leads to autarkeia, self-sufficiency,that assures the sage ataraxia, tranquility of the soul. The dimension of interiority in ancient thought, constituted by vigilance and attention to the self,

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by self-examination,and exertions of the will, memory, imagination and reason, is in service of a freedom to judge that will guarantee one the independence of wisdom.73 It is an internal life ultimately concentrated around the sage or daimdn in one, therefore allowing the philosopher to separate himself from passions and desires that do not depend on him. This is a kind of interiorization that aims at transcendence, and if Foucault's interpretation of ancient ethics seems sometimes to border on an estheticization of the self, Hadot's interpretation insists on the divinization of the self. This is not the occasion on which to sketch further the history of ethics as the history of the self's relationship to itself, the history of ethics as ascetics. Foucault has pointed to homosexual askksis and the homosexual style of life as exemplifications of this history. Hadot has himself indicated that certain experiences of the modem artist partake of the cosmic consciousness of the ancient sage; as Klee wrote, "His progress in the observation and the vision of nature makes him accede little by little to a philosophical vision of the universe that allows him freely to create abstract forms. . . . The artist thus creates works, or participates in the creation of works that are in the image of the work of God."74 If most of modem moral philosophy finds the idea of ethics as a spiritual exercise, to say the least, strange, it would be false to conclude that these ethical ppblematizations disappear from the history of philosophy after the ancients. The thematics that Stanley Cavell identifies as moral perfectionism constitutes one continuation of this history of ethics. When Cavell portrays Emersonian self-reliance as "the mode of the self's relation to its elf"?^ or when he describes Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as exhibiting, "as purely as any work I know, philosophizing as a spiritual struggle,"76 he is working toward a conceptualization of ethics that shares with Foucault and Hadot the idea that what is at issue is not only a code of good conduct but a way of being that involves every aspect of one's soul.77 And as Cavell follows out Emerson's remark in "History" ("So all that is said of the wise man by stoic or oriental or modem essayist, describes to each. man his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self"), he is pursuing the ancient conception of the sage or d a i d n in us, that self-reliance both within and beyond one's self.78 Paul Veyne has described the Nietzschean ~bermenschas the

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modernized version of the ancient sage.79 If the ~bermenschis such a modernized version, obviously it is not identical with the ancient figure. But there are points of comparison so startling that it would be perverse to overlook them. Hadot's interpretation of ancient philosophy lays great emphasis on the representation of philosophy as an exercise and training for death, and as a meditation upon death.80 In his 1981-82 course at the College de France, Foucault devoted detailed descriptions to those ancient "exercises of thought" known as praemeditatio malonun, meditation on future evils, and melete thanatou, meditation on or exercise for death.81 He interprets the latter as "a way of rendering death present in life," an exercise by which the sage effects spiritual transformation.82 Such a dimension seems to me to capture isely the force of Nietzche's introduction of the idea of the ( ternal ?recurrent '--7 in section -3 4. 1 of The Gay J Science. I quote this s e c m What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sign and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?83

How could one fail to see that this is a modem meditation that effects spiritual transformation; that is, problematizes one's way of life through a series of questions with ancient reverberations?This is from Seneca's fifty-ninth Letter: I shall now show you how you may know that you are not wise. The wise man is joyful, happy and calm, unshaken; he lives on a plane with the gods.

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Now go, question yourself; if you are never downcast, if your mind is not harassed by any apprehension, through anticipations of what is to come, if day and night your soul keeps on its even and unswerving course, upright and content with itself, then you have attained to the greatest good that mortals can p0ssess.~4

If this thought gained possession of you, so Seneca believed, it would change you as you are. In concentrating on questions of interpretation of ancient texts, I hope to have shown, first, that Foucault's conceptualization of ethics as the self's relation to itself does not depend on any modem understanding of subjectivity. Writing this history of ethics is part of writing a history of the self. Second, Foucault's conceptualization does not entail a narrowing of the domain of ethics, as if this history were threatened with a collapse into a history of the varieties of egoism. The demarcation of the self's relation to itself as the central arena of ethical problematization is inextricably tied to the theme of the proper way of life. The self's relation to itself manifests one's style of life, and the philosophical way of life forces a transformed relation to oneself. In his extraordinary interpretation of the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo in his last lectures at the College de France, as well as in his 1983 seminar at the University of California at Berkeley, Foucault argued that Socratic parrhesia, the Socratic practice of truth-telling, is a specifically ethical practice and is distinguished from other kinds of truth-telling, and especially from political truth-telling, by its objective - to incite each person to occupy himself wit6 himself. Thus the essential theme of ethical parrhdsia is the care of the self.85 It is evident in listening to these lectures that Foucault wanted to link

Dumkzil's remarkable "Divertissement sur l& dernigres paroles de Socrate," Foucault follows Dumkzil in arguing that one cannot interpret Socrates' last words - "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius" - as acknowledging a debt to Asclepius (the god to whom the Greeks offered a sacrifice when a cure was at issue)for having cured Socrates of the illness that is life.86 Despite this traditional and often-repeated interpretation, Dumkzil and Foucault attempt to show that it is com-

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pletely at odds with Socratic teaching to impute to Socrates the claim that life is an illness and that death thus cures us of life. But Asclepius is the god one thanks for a cure, and so, following a complicated philological and philosophical path that I will not attempt to reconstruct here, Dumkzil and Foucault argue that the illness that Socrates is cured of is that corruption of the soul which results from following the general, ordinary opinion of mankind. Socrates is not concerned with the opinion of the masses, appealed to in the Crito in an attempt to convince him to escape from prison; he is rather concerned with himself and with his own relation to truth, and he has courageously learned to free himself from the soul-sicknessof common opinion.87 Socrates' ethical parrhdsia, divorced from the opinion of the public, is his style of life. It is this style of life that he ceaselessly presents to others, for which others put him to death. Foucault says that it is the principle of concerning oneself with oneself that Socrates bequeaths to others;as he might have equally underscored the figure of Socrates that endures for us as a constantly irritating and inspiring reminder of the philosophical way of life. Socratesreminds us of nothing less than the fact that, for the practitioners of ancient philosophy, philosophy itself was a way of life.89 Ethical problems were not resolved by producing a list of required, permitted, and forbidden actions, but were centered around one's attitude to oneself, and so to others and the world - one's style of living. In his last writings Foucault expressed concern that the ancient principle "Know thyself" had obscured, at least for us modems, the similarly ancient requirement that we occupy ourselves with ourselves, that we care for ourselves. He insisted that we not forget that the demand to know oneself was "regularly associated with the theme of the care of the self."go It is in this spirit that I have urged that the care of the self must itself be placed in the context of a style of life, that in order to make sense of the care of the self we must widen our vision to include the style of life that gives form and direction to the self's relation to itself. Classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman thought, early Christianity, and even the Old Testaments~all prescribe the care of the self; but the styles of life in which this care is embedded are so different that it affects the notion of care, thenotion of the self, and the notions of how and why we are to bear this relation of care to ourselves. One of the great virtues of

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ancient thought is that knowledge of oneself, care of oneself, and one's style of life are everywhere so woven together that one cannot, without distortion, isolate any of these issues from the entire philosophical thematics of which they form part. If we ignore these dimensions of the moral life, we shall be able to do justice neither to history nor philosophy. And, without doubt worse, we shall not be able to take account of ourselves, of who we have become, of how we might become different. NOTES I

2

3

4 5 6 7

8

My understanding of these unpublished volumes is derived both from remarks made by Foucault in Volume I of The History of Sexuality and from conversations with him in 1976 just after the publication of that volume. Arnold I. Davidson, "Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1986). Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985)~26-32. See also "On the Genealogy of Ethlcs: An Overview of Work in Progress," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books). Michel Foucault, "Subjectivitk et veritk, 1980-81," in Rdsumd des Cours, 1970-1982 (Paris:Julliard, 1989)~I 34-3 5. Ibid., 135-36. The quoted phrase is from ibid., 134. Paul Veyne, "The Final Foucault and His Ethics," Critical Inquiry 20, no. I (Autumn1993)~7. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 198611 41.

-

Ibid., 64. 10 Ibid., 66. I I Ibid., 66-67. The quotation from Seneca is from "Epistle XXIII" of Seneca, The Epistles of Seneca (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, I 917). 12 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 66. Pierre Haddot, "Reflkxions sur la notion de 'culture de soil1" in Michel ~oucault,Philosophe (Paris:~ d i tions du Seuil, 1989))262. 13 Pierre Hadot, ibid., 262. 14 Ibid., 263, and Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, DeuxiBme ddtion revue et augment6e (Paris: etudes Augustiniennes, 1987],218-19, 231. 9

Ethics as ascetics Hadot, "Reflexions sur la notion de 'culture de soil1" 263. See also Pierre Hadot, "Le Sage et le monde," in Le Temps de la reflexion, Vol. X (Paris: Gallimard, I 989), 176-77. 16 Hadot, "Reflexions sur la notion de 'culture de soil1" 267. 17 Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 232. 18 Michel Foucault, "L'hermkneutique du sujet, 1981-82," in Rdsumd des COUrS, 1970-1982, 145-49. 19 On the notion of the dllation of the self, see Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 23 I. 20 Hadot, "Reflexions sur la notion de 'culture de soil1" 267. See also Hadot, "Le Sage et le monde," 176. 21 Ibid., 267. 22 For Foucault's discussion of Baudelaire and dandyism, see "What is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, 39-42. 23 I do think that Hadot's interpretation of these ancient texts is the historically accurate interpretation. Foucault's interpretations are, I believe, motivated, at least in part, by his specific interest in the history of the present, by, for example, his interest in the notion of homosexual askesis (which I hscuss later in this essay) and by his insistence, in discussing dandyism in "What Is Enlightenment?" (41-42), on linking the ascetic and the aesthetic. For Hadot the relation between beauty and moral value, or the good, is quite different (see Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 231). As Hadot recognizes, what is ultimately at stake is not just differences of interpretation but basic philosophical choices ("Reflexions sur la notion de 'culture de soil1" 261). 24 Arnold I. Davidson, "Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy: An Introduction to Pierre Hadot," Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (Spring 1990). 25 Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 2 I 8. For more discussion, see my "Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy: An Introduction to Pierre Hadot." 26 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 9. 27 Ibid. 28 In what follows, I say nothing about the Wittgensteinian idea (which is distinct from that of a way of life and a style of life) of forms of life. My understanding of the latter idea follows Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque, New Mexico: Living Batch 40-52. Press, 1989)~ 29 Pierre Hadot, "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philoso491-92. phy" Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (Spring 1990)~ 30 Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, Chapter 2. 31 Ibid., 51-52, 57, 225. For more discussion of this point, see my "SpiriI5

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tual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy: An Introduction to Pierre Hadot," 477-478. 32 Hadot, "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosphy," 495. 33 Foucault, "L'hermeneutique du sujet, 1981-1982," 148-49. 34 Michel Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84) (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989))302. 35 Michel Foucault, "Friendship as a Way of Life," in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84), 206. 36 Ibid., 206-207. 37 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 50. 38 Foucault, "Friendship as a Way of Life," in Foucault Live, 205-207; "Sexual Choice, Sexual Act," in Foucault Live, 228; and "Michel Foucault. An Interview: Sex, power and the Politics of Identity," in Advocate (August 7, 1984). 39 Michel Foucault, "Michel Foucault. Le gai savoir," in Mec Magazine (June 1988))34. See also "Michel Foucault. An Interview: Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity," in Advocate, 27. 40 Foucault, "Michel Foucault. An Interview: Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity," in Advocate, 27. 41 Foucault, "Sexual Choice, Sexual Act," in Foucault Live, 228. 42 Discussions with Pierre Hadot have made it clear to me that my claims here depend on the view, w h c h I believe was Foucault's view, that homosexuality, as he wanted to understand it, could involve a style of life in the sense of a phlosophical ethics. It is such an understanding that allows one to link ancient philosophical askesis and contemporary homosexual askesis. 43 The notion of the history of the present appears at the end of Chapter One of Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 44 Jean-Pierre Vernant, "The Individual within the City-State," in Mortals and Immortals, Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)) 321. , 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 332. See Arnaldo Mo&gliano, "Marcel Mauss e il problema della persona nella biografia 'greca," in Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1987).For related issues, see Paul Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Ethics as ascetics 49 Jean-Pierre Vemant, "Psuchd: Simulacrum of the Body or Image of the Divine," in Mortals and Immortals. The quotation is from 190. 50 Vemant, "The Individual within the City-State," 330. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 328-29, 332. 53 The first quotation is from Foucault, The Care of the Self, 42. The second quotation is from Vemant, "Psuchd: Simulacrum of the Body or Image of the Divine," 192. 54 Pierre Hadot, Titres et '12avaux de Pierre Hadot. Privately printed by the Collkge de France, 28. 55 Pierre Hadot, "Le figure du sage dans llAntiquiti @co-latine" in Les sagesses du monde, ed. Gilbert Gadoffre (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1991)l 13. 56 Paul Veyne, "La medication interminable" in Seneca, De la tranquilitb de l ' h e (Paris: Editions Rivages, I 988), 5 6. 5 7 Cited by Hadot in "La figure du sage dans 1'Antiquiti eco-latine," I 3. 58 Ibid., I I. 59 Ibid., 18, 12. 60 I shall not take up here the complicated question of the precise relation between the ideas of the daim6n and the sage. Each of them corresponds, in a certain way, to a transcendent norm. But the daim6n, which derives from religious psychology, is perceived as an active presence in the soul, while the sage is conceived of as an almost inaccessible ideal that orients and guides one's life. I am indebted to Pierre Hadot for discussion on this point. See Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 102-103, 105-106; La Citadelle intbrieure. Introduction aux "Pendes" de Marc Aurele (Paris: Fayard, 1992))92-93, 139-41, 176-77; and "La figure du sage dans llAntiquiti eco-latine," especially p. 20. 61 See also Seneca, "Epistle XLI" and "Epistle CXXIV" in The Epistles of

Seneca. 62 Seneca, "Epistle LM" in The Epistles of Seneca. The quotation is from 417. 63 The first quotation is from "Epistle XXIII" in The Epistles of Seneca, 16 I; the second quotation is from "Epistle LIX" in The Epistles of Seneca, 417. See also "Epistle XLI" in The Epistles of Seneca. 64 Hadot, "La figure du sage dans l'Antiquit.6 &co-latine," 20. 65 See Pierre Hadot, "La terre vue d'en haut et le voyage cosmique. Le point de vue du pdte, du philosophe et de l'historien," in Frontiers and Space Conquest, ed. J. Schneider and M. Uger-Orine (TheNetherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988); "Histoire de la p e n l e hellenistique et romaine: La physique comme exercise spirituel et le regard d'en haut," in

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Annuaire du Collkge de France, 1987-1988: Resum6 des cows et travaux (Paris: Collkge de France, 1988); and La Citadelle intdrieure, 188-93. 66 Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 46-47, 48-49. The relevant text of Plotinus is Ennead I, 6,9. I discuss this passage and Hadot's interpretation of it at length in my introduction to Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also Jean-PierreVemant, "Psuch6: Simulacrum of the Body or Image of the Divine," 192. 67 Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 23 I. 68 Plotinus, Enneads, trans A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966);Ennead, I, 6, 9, 259. 69 Plotinus, Enneads, ibid. Ennead, I, 6, 6, 251. 70 Hadot, "La figure du sage dans llAntiquiti @co-latine," 19-20. 71 Ibid., p. 19. See also Pierre Hadot, "Histoire de la p e n l e hellenistique et romaine: Interioriti et libertt? chez Marc Aun5le," in Annuaire du College de France, 1989-90: Resumt des cours et travaux (Pans: Collkge de France, 1990). 72 See, for example, Epictetus, Manual, 5 and Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, XI, 16. 73 Hadot, "La figure du sage dans llAntiquiti &co-latine," 19-20. 74 Hadot, "Le Sage et le monde," 181. 75 Stanley Cavell, "Thinking of Emerson," in The Senses of Walden (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981)~134. 76 Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 37. 77 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 28-32; Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 13-14, 59-60. I bring together Cavell's and Hadot's work in "La &couverte de Thoreau et d'Emerson par Stanley Cavell ou les exercices spirituels de la philosophie," forthcoming in Lire Cavell, ed. Sandra Laugier (~ditionsde 116clat). 78 Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990)~8-10. 79 Paul Veyne, "La medication interminable," 27. 80 Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, 37-47; "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse in Ancient Philosophy," 494-495. 8 I Foucault, "L1herm6neutiquedu sujet," I 60--166. 82 Ibid., 164. ) 83 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974)) 273-74. I am indebted to Jim Conant for discussionof this point. 84 Seneca, "Epistle LM" in The Epistles of Seneca, 419. 85 Foucault's seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, 1983, was Z

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on the theme of parrhdsia. His 1984 lectures at the College de France were also on this theme. In my characterization here, I follow Foucault's lecture of February I 5, 1984, College de France. Georges Dumkzil, "Divertissement sur les dernieres paroles de Socrate," in ". . . Le Moyne noir en gris dedans Varennes" (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Foucault, Lecture of February 15, 1984, College de France. See also Eliane Allots conversation with Dumkzil, "Entretien avec Georges Dumkzil 5 propos de l'interpktation de Michel Foucault, juin 1985," in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 61 (March 1986).The text from Platols Phaedo occurs at I 18. For a brief statement of Dumezil's interpretation, see Eliane Allo, "Entretien avec Georges Dumkzil 5 propos de l'interpktation de Michel Foucault, juin, 1985," 87. Foucault discusses the relevant texts at length in his lectures of February 15, February 22, and February 29, 1984, College de France. This remark occurs at the end of Foucault's lecture, February 15, 1984, College de France. On this topic, see Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, Chapter 3. Foucault, "L1herm6neutiquedu sujet," 145. On the history of the theme "know thyself", see Pierre Courcelle, Connais-toi toi-mbme; de Socrate a saint Bernard (Paris:~tudesAugustiniennes, 1974- I 975). Among the Old Testament texts I have in mind is Deuteronomy 4:9.

I am indebted to Diane Brentari, Stanley Cavell, Jim Conant, Jan Goldstein, Pierre Hadot, and David Halperin for comments on and discussions of earlier versions of this paper. This essay is dedicated to Pierre Hadot on his seventieth birthday.

MICHAEL M A H O N

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The ethics of Michel Foucault

A recent ethics textbook aimed at university-level students, in listing the presuppositions of any ethical system, begins, "Singular moral judgments are never merely singular." By their very nature moral judgments are implicitly universalizable, and only "a peculiar kind of irrationality" that "has come to infect contemporary thinking" could allow one to dispute this self-evident truth.1 Aristotle was mystified by those who claimed that a characteristic function could be found for an eye, a hand, a foot, a carpenter, or a tanner, but that none could be found for human beings in general. An ethical principle, according to Kant, must be universally applicable if it is to be considered as having any validity whatsoever. Foucault, however, disconcerts. By claiming that there are no universally applicable principles, no normative standards, "no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life," EnucaulrPccord. i n e h a r l e s Taylor, relinquishes anv w w e r that his cal analyses might have.zcWithout such a "normative yardstick," according to Jiirgen Habermas, Foucault's historical analv ... be genuinely critical., Indeed, Foucault's skepticism with regard to x e notions of unizrsal human nature or universal rationality is clear. He associates universal human nature with the Enlightenment doctrine of humanism, which provides a vision of the human essence with which men and women are expected to corbrm, thus

ism, existentialism, personalism, National Socialism, and Stalinism

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